CHANTONNAY Chondrite Meteorite French Historic Fall From 1812

Chantonnay
History (P.-M. Pelé, meteor-center.com): During the night of August 5, 1812, at 2 a.m., travelers and residents of Chantonnay observed a meteor, followed by a violent detonation. Around noon the same day, a sharecropper in the hamlet of Haute-Revétizon (today Les Revêtisons), located southwest of Chantonnay, discovered a meteorite in a field very close to his house. He kept his find for more than two years. In December 1814, Mr Cavoleau, an ecclesiastic and Vendean politician and historian, learned of the existence of this rock, which was said to have fallen from the sky, and he identifed it as a meteorite. Eager to acquire the entirety of the stone, he could only recover a third of the total mass, the rest having been already distributed by the finder to relatives and friends.